Have you tried managing teenagers? Ordering them around? Believe me, a complete waste of time, and counter-productive at best.

Hard as it is, there is only one way, aka leadership:

Explain the reasons and purposes and values we live by, down to why dirty dishes needs to find it's way into the dishwasher. Each time.

Be the perfect example, all the time, never let down your guard as teenagers have an uncanny ability of spotting discrepancies between what you say and what you do. And trust me, it takes milliseconds before you have to face it. Did I mention that this part is the hardest and where I fail all the time?

Mindless stuff you might need to manage - sheep for example.

Mindful persons who know what to do, why they do it and the value of it all can organise themselves. In other words, leadership first then get out of the way.

There are only two instances where "management" and "people" are in the same sentence:

When you need to organise disorganised bits and pieces like flight, rental car and hotel for your next trip so it all coincides.

When the people do not know the whys and the values nor do they see the good examples that transfers such information.

Then why is "managing" still on the agenda in enterprises? Why did I go to "management school"?

Are the enterprises disorganised?

Do many not really know the whys and the values, having only been trained in the hows?

Or is it the fact that leadership is damned hard while herding sheep seems so much easier?

Methinks that all three are to blame.

Leading is hard, very hard, and requires a full time state of mind - business at it's best. Managing is often a matter of dishing out orders, burstyness at it's worst.

(Hat tip to James for "business" vs "burstyness", very useful indeed.)

Every time I'm mentioning blogging for my non-blogging friends I'm asked "how can you earn money with that?"

To which I suggest the term "because of rather than with" minted by Doc Searls and expanded nicely by JP.

My practical example is thingamy having an annual "marketing" budget of 89 $ (this blog) giving more than enough leads if you think "marketing" plus a whole bunch of extremely smart people to bounce ideas off for marvellous discussions - rather my "board of directors" they are and the blog being the "board meeting". That's enhanced business because of!

And now I can add Redmonk as a great example, a small, eager and smart industry analyst boutique who's partners blogs incessantly. Blogging being an increasingly important factor, even replacing the old fashioned web sites and other communication with the market, this ranking takes that into account and my friends from Redmonk came in as 1,2 and 3 of 50 blogging analyst no less!

What piqued my interest was the obvious: While the CEO is mired in the command & control structure and thus focused on managing, the chairman has to rely on pure leadership without managing (except getting the board members to be on time and get somebody to write the minutes of course).

And as you might have gleaned from a few earlier posts I'm not fond of managing and it's mother; the command & control hierarchy. Leadership on the other hand, well, that we need. More of that and less of the former please - but that's not easy, leading is harder than ordering.

The book's six disciplines are three too many for my short attention span, but three I could easily see as result of the others.

That left three important ones, here slightly skewed by my attitude:

Sensemaking.

Clarify the whys, communicate and champion the strategy and values. The values being the framework and the strategy the map - without absolute clarity and thorough understanding throughout an organisation the rest is moot. That does make sense does it not?

Live the values.

Without trust and integrity no leadership will happen, and with no leadership nothing happens. And as I often say, trust equals transparency - and in this case transparency would be rather counterproductive without integrity. One could easily say that this requires a matching personality - strong sense of values, integrity and transparency. That's a tough set of requirements, requires some self confidence that.

Influence outcomes.

Convince, communicate and focus. No "orders" allowed, the meaning of the ideas must be clear, the important questions shall be identified and the value of the actions must be plain. One is working with free will here.

Note the argument that the chairperson historically had a more important role than generally perceived today given the widespread visibility of CEOs. But now it seems that the chairperson's importance is increasing again, if the roles are split at all that is. And split they should be in my humble opinion.

Methinks that the increase of a chairperson's importance is a result of the slow erosion of the rigid organisational hierarchies thanks to the ubiquitous networking, like blogs and wikis and the rest of it. A shift from managing to leadership again, makes me happy that.

That was once upon the time a very different spreadsheet, and I do remember it as extremely cool and powerful and never got it why it failed..

That's why I study it, thingamy is also a very different product (and hopefully cool and powerful one day) - lessons to be learned methinks.

I tend to agree to two arguments, the second one put forward by one of the original creators:

1. Impatience killed it, such a new and different product simply needs time and nurturing and will have a slow uptake. Lotus killed it too early.

2. If different some parts of it will be seen as bugs by the current market, try then to find niches where the weakness could be seen as strength. In Improv's case it was too structured for many, a "feature" the financial users found most useful.

(Note: Thingamy in parallel would fit nicely in for the orphans of processes, the daily practices where the agility is needed and where the legacy systems are too cumbersome and rigid. Then nurture it therein and let it move over time to other areas of use.)

But in my quest I found there is actually a company still producing an Improv similar spreadsheet, Quantrix, so I popped over there and for those of you with accounting / financial background I am sure you will enjoy the demo - follow the link to Quantrix Modeler Tour on this page!

I've wanted to try out the Nike training programs for my iPod for a long time, and today I plonked down the moolahs at iTunes.

French not being my first language I really wanted the nice "personal trainer" to speak... say English. But no such luck, my IP address is in France so now I must listen to the enthusiastic voice in French. No choice, take it or leave it, the music industry's nifty trade barriers is at work.

Sitting at the back of the auditorium my mind was on all the places where I am and where people link to me and vice versa, often the same people in more than one place. In the beginning kind of fun, but what then?

Jyri's postulate was that services offering nothing but social connection - LinkedIn was mentioned - will have a limited life span. Some kind of social object has to be a part of the experience according to Jyri - like photos, videos, or at minimum some of the music objects that Myspace focus on.

And I tend to agree, all the linking is nice enough but the "so what" feeling is there already.

When at Reboot I for whatever reason did a thingamy demo session, just because the opportunity presented itself.

Five minutes to demo a system that could replace most other enterprise software, albeit in a very alternative fashion, is kind of optimistic. Plain stupid comes to mind as well.

That probably none in the audience would ever be in a position to build and use such a system (other than as an end user) adds even more frivolity to such stunts.

If you want to be a rock star at conferences stick to web 2.0, office 2.0 or anything social software - if you want to invoke yawning, try talk about business processes and Sarbanes Oxley 404.

Still I'm not entirely beaten in the quest for public interest, after all, enterprise software we'll all touch almost daily in one way or the other - it deserves to invoke more interest. Working on it, no easy task though.